Smart watch has become a part of our daily life just a short while ago, when they captured a niche of smartphones accessories and wearable technology. Not only they function as a regular watch, they can manage and send remote commands to your smartphone! With this article we’re starting a new discussion and series of blog posts on software development and interaction between gadgets and Android-based smartphones.

Wearable Technology Concept

Samsung Galaxy Gear Smartwatch represents a new and expanding class of electronic devices – wearable devices or wearable computers. Their key feature is basically explained within the term itself: These devices are worn by the user – hence they are with him or her all the time. Of course these days hardly anyone goes anywhere without their smartphone, but the uniqueness of the wearable device is that it becomes an attached part of our body, effortlessly following us anywhere we go. Such intimate contact with this device implicates its more active usage. For instance one can easily miss a call on his phone, which can be on silent in one’s pocket or purse, but it would be pretty hard to not pay attention to the smartwatch vibration on your wrist.

Over the last decade the Manifesto for Agile Software Development has revolutionized the tech world. Since then it’s become serious alternative to old-school approaches such as Waterfall. Today Agile remains a top methodology for software development. Many professional developers and their customers became fans when they saw the superb results, under constrained budgets, and within the shortest possible time frames.

How do Agile and Waterfall differ?

Back in 2000, the Waterfall paradigm and the Fixed Price model were the software development gold standards. Although still widely used, experience revealed a number of serious flaws. With Waterfall, for example, software development is based on, and entirely controlled by, specifications. This by the book approach makes the development process very rigid and inefficient.

In contrast, Agile aligns with the Time & Materials approach, and aims at minimizing risks by dividing the development process into short time-cycles called iterations that typically last from two to three weeks.

This flexible development methodology had been used even prior to the adoption of the Agile Manifesto, but only afterwards did Agile become widely popular.Read the rest of this entry »

Although mobile development has been actively growing for the past several years, web development remains one of the strongest segments of software development market. Having a huge experience in web development, we’re trying to share our most interesting projects and innovative solutions with our DB Best blog readers. To complete our recent review posts here is a selection of the most popular web-development articles and posts.

Ukraine is back to the front pages and top news reports, and while all our friends and clients are getting concerned, team DB Best Ukraine has released a new fresh video, which makes you question all the news produced by the global media industry.

The city of Kharkov, where our Development Center is located, is getting ready for the spring time: municipality workers are fixing the alleys, construction workers are trying to finish their projects by summer, businesses working as usual.

DB Best Ukraine Team is working hard on multiple data base management and migration, custom development and modernization projects, including the new Microsoft SSMA upgrade project, which DB Best is developing in cooperation with our partner- Microsoft corporation. Our developers are actively working on the release of the new version of SSMA line of products. As a part of this project, we are planning to develop new features, which would allow Oracle to Azure migration, as well as database migration to MS SQL 2014, which is set to release in the nearest future.

DB Best Ukraine with the latest news from the “frontline” that will make you smile!

Many clients turn to DB Best Technologies for help when developing specific products. When working with this type of request, we recommend either of two models of engagement: project-based and team-based. This article looks at the distinct advantages of team-based development using a dedicated team involved throughout the product’s lifecycle.

The project-based model

With the project-based model, developers built the product from start to launch, but the development process stops after release. When the client needs additional features or wants to release an updated version, the development resumes until the release of version 2.0. Clients in this situation typically face budget constraints and also want to see ROI before proceeding with further development, so a fixed-price payment model works best.

The team-based model

The team-based model, in contrast, works best for clients who understand their project’s complexity and potential pitfalls. They understand that new product creation is an iterative process, with an undefined number of development rounds. These clients are also able to make gradual and ongoing investments that result in high-quality final results and ongoing rewards.

In less than 2 years DB Best professionals have written and posted over 100 technical articles on database migration and management related topics. These articles have gathered more than 20K views, thousands of likes and dozens of comments from various database management professionals from all over the world. In this post we would like to present a concise and informative review of our most rated articles:

Ukraine and its political crisis have stayed on the front pages of all the newspapers, and have been constantly broadcasted by the major TV Channels worldwide for several months now. One of the positive outcomes- at last almost everyone knows where Ukraine is located geographically! The informational flood in the media without any doubts leads to confusion, panic and uncertainty, especially on behalf of our clients, whose projects are being partially or entirely developed at DB Best Development Center in Ukraine.

Jokes aside, Ukraine is going through tough times, and we all hope for a peaceful conflict resolution in the nearest future. But not everything presented in the media should be taken for granted. Check out this short video DB Best Ukraine Team have put together.

DB Best is working hard to secure high-quality end products for all our clients!

Transferring photo and video files between mobile devices is one of the most common everyday tasks performed by smart phone users. In one of our recent projects we had a task to define and implement the most efficient way for data transfer between the two most popular platforms: iOS and Android.

The biggest challenge we faced when working on the project was that the file transfer speed was very slow (~0.16 Mbit/s) when using Bluetooth, which had to do with Bluetooth hardware specification. It was not as important for transferring 2 bytes of data, but for a 3-4 MB image file transfer, which took up to 3 minutes, it was quite critical. To solve this problem we’ve decided to switch to Wi-Fi, which has allowed us to transfer the file of the same size within just 2-3 seconds.

Before we dive into 2014 with it’s new goals, challenges and opportunities, we would like to take a second to recap some of our top achievements in 2013. Big thanks to all our clients, partners and DB Best team who made it all happen!

In this article we will talk about the challenges and solutions around building a peer-to-peer network for iOS and Android mobile devices using Bluetooth. This experience is based on one of the recent projects of our mobile team.

Main idea

A peer-to-peer or P2P network is not a new concept. It has been beautifully implemented in some of the very famous products like Napster, Kazaa, Skype to name a few… In this article we will present some technical aspects and challenges of what it takes to build a mobile p2p network over modern mobile devices using iOS and Android.

A P2P network is a decentralized computer network, designed around the concept of equality of its nodes (called “peers”), where each node acts both as a client and a server. Often this type of network does not have central servers, and each “peer” acts both as a client and a server. As opposed to the client-server centralized architecture, P2P system allows to maintain the network performance and operational efficiency while using any number and combination of the available nodes.

Building a P2P network on mobile devices over Bluetooth can be particularly useful in several cases: